Pace analysis hints Marc Marquez advantage isn't as big as his rivals fear

Just a few rounds ago the pens were circling the Aragon Grand Prix as a circuit where Marc Marquez was surely set to add to his victory haul on his factory Ducati in 2025. A winner at the venue six times in the premier class, its left-handed layout has always played into his strengths.

But Ducati comes to the Aragon GP off the back of successive defeats in MotoGP for the first time since 2022. Context allows the Italian manufacturer to (for now, at least) not look at the last two rounds as a forming pattern.

The wet French GP pushed Marc Marquez into a cautious approach a fortnight on from his crash out of the Spanish Grand Prix. The British Grand Prix was run in the dry, but especially cold and windy conditions threw the Ducatis off-stride, while a chaotic Sunday race opened the door for another defeat.

If Silverstone was arguably the worst circuit for Marc Marquez’s riding style, especially with his limited physical mobility on his right side since his arm injury five years ago, the fact he came away with a third and an extended championship lead will have calmed nerves.

Ducati will have sighed with even more relief when it saw the number 93 top both practice sessions on Friday at Aragon, Marc Marquez from Alex Marquez as normality in 2025 looks to have finally resumed.

At one stage in both sessions over a second clear of the field, Marc Marquez looked in the kind of form that usually precedes a dominant grand prix victory. Memories of Aragon last year, where he flattened the competition on his GP23-spec Ducati to score his first Sunday victory on the Desmosedici remain fresh in the mind.

Able to reel out fast laps from the off, there were shades of the 2024 weekend on Friday in the Spanish desert. But the circumstances that allowed the Ducati rider to maintain his advantage throughout the 2024 event - continual overnight rain, a fresh asphalt - won’t be things he can rely on this time around.

And while he comes out of Friday looking the favourite, it’s perhaps not by as much as expected. With repeated Sunday mistakes something he has made a point of talking about the need to iron out so far this weekend, the door is open for him to go without a seventh Aragon Grand Prix victory.

Strong used tyre pace gives Marc Marquez a small edge for Aragon MotoGP

When Marc Marquez flung in the 1m46.397s that would allow him to top Friday’s Practice session at Aragon, it immediately moved him over a second clear of the field. It would take Gresini’s Alex Marquez a few tries before he knocked that advantage down to the 0.204s it ended as at the chequered flag.

That ability to instantly feel the conditions and produce lap times will more than likely help the elder Marquez brother to pole on Saturday, while also putting him in a prime position for a seventh sprint win in eight rounds.

But it’s Sunday that holds the biggest question mark. Marc Marquez’s speed is not in doubt, nor is his tyre preservation. But he’s crashed out of the lead of the Americas Grand Prix; fell from third while in a position to fight for victory at the Spanish Grand Prix; and was only spared from a third crash while leading at the British Grand Prix by a red flag for a separate incident.

He’s vowed to change how he manages Sundays, but he wouldn’t say what that actually meant.

He led the way in used tyre pace with an average of 1m47.725s on the medium rear, setting a 1m47.1s on the 13th and final lap of that tyre. That’s given him a pretty handy advantage over his Ducati rivals, namely Alex Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia.

Alex Marquez did roughly the same distance on the medium over nearly the same sample number of representative laps, with his pace working out at 1m48.206s. At just under 0.5s difference, his older brother will be taking almost a second out of him every lap in a race scenario.

The Gresini rider felt like his feeling with the asphalt was “even weirder” than it was last year, when the surface was new. Needing to find a better feeling, that will hold him back in truly eating into Marc Marquez’s advantage. However, he also believes he hasn’t been able to show his true race pace yet as something went wrong with his GP24 during the afternoon session.

Bagnaia’s pace is not that far from Alex Marquez’s at 1m48.312s, albeit over a short sample run, as he continues to try to adapt his riding style to the 2025 Ducati. He revealed on Friday that he was struggling with front locking on the way into the turns, sometimes “locking for 30 metres”. Already, getting on terms with team-mate Marc Marquez will be a tall order, but maybe there is a possibility to take the fight to Alex Marquez.

For now, Marc Marquez has his main title rivals at arm’s length. And it seems like he is already looking at himself as his biggest threat.

“Here, everything comes more naturally but also I need extra concentration not to make any mistakes,” he said. “When you feel good you try to exaggerate on the corners where you feel better, and you can do a mistake. Always I keep focused. But I am trying to understand to push when I feel, not when… sometimes the situation is that you need to push for some laps but maybe you don’t feel it. So I am trying to concentrate on pushing when I feel it, and avoid these situations.”

KTM bucking expectations after strong Aragon Friday

The tone of voice coming from the KTM camp after a difficult British Grand Prix was one of utter despair. Struggling in low-grip conditions, that teed up another nightmare event at Aragon for the Austrian manufacturer’s stable.

But Friday really couldn’t have gone much better for KTM. For the first time since the Catalan Grand Prix last year, it managed to get three riders directly through to Q2. Maverick Vinales reclaimed his place as the leading RC16 rider in Practice in third overall, but Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder were not far off at all in fifth and seventh.

Acosta was at a bit of a loss to explain why KTM was so strong, because “it’s the worst grip of the season” at Aragon. In theory, the KTM shouldn’t be fast at all in these conditions. He reckons when “it’s this super low grip, everyone’s level goes down and ours goes up”.

Acosta’s pace was decent, as the above table shows, though he didn’t put many laps on the medium. Vinales also didn’t put many representative laps on the medium rear in Practice, but did a handful of tours on a used one. Albeit only from a two-lap sample, Vinales’ pace on a medium rear with 13 laps on it was 1m47.830s.

Vinales believes he is “not far” from Alex Marquez’s pace, but sees his fight realistically to be for between third and sixth in the grand prix.

“I think at the moment on paper it’s to fight from third to sixth, but even from Alex we are not far - 0.1s maybe,” he said. “It’s something we need to improve. I always said to my guys ‘this is not that bad, we only need 0.1s. Stay calm, work, and this 0.1s with consistency we’re going to get it.”

Managing rear wear has been something Vinales has been able to do this year to get to the podium on the road in Qatar and stay in the top five at Jerez. Acosta also has prior KTM podium form at Aragon form last year, so knows how to navigate the low-grip surface to a strong result.

Given the pressure being put on KTM by its riders to find some kind of a step forward, carrying on this form into the rest of the weekend will help to calm things a little and let it dig into the real solutions it needs to fix its problems.

MotoGP’s Japanese battle going the way of Honda early in Aragon weekend

Yamaha’s run of three successive pole positions looks unlikely to continue this weekend at Aragon, after the top M1 was 15th at the end of Practice. Fabio Quartararo, who has taken all of those poles, was all the way down in 18th as he spent his day fighting with a lack of rear grip on his bike.

Frustratingly for Yamaha, it’s having to sit and watch Honda excel in the key area it has been struggling in - chiefly, rear grip.

Joan Mir put his Honda fourth on the timesheets in Practice with an identical 1m46.953s to Maverick Vinales, while Johann Zarco was sixth on his LCR-run Honda. Encouragingly, the pace for both right now puts them firmly in that battle for the final podium spot.

Honda’s form is somewhat similar to KTM’s, in that grip conditions are so poor for everyone that something that has typically been a weakness is not proving to be as big a disadvantage. But Mir was also very complimentary of the RC213V and the job Honda has been doing.

“In the last few races I think we were very close to doing this result, but for some reason we couldn’t put it together,” he said. “Today we improved a little bit the grip on the rear part of the bike and that was enough to make a result. So, it’s not a coincidence, it’s not a surprise, it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time.”

Zarco has already shown that the Honda is capable of podiums in dry conditions after his run to second at the British Grand Prix. But Mir carrying this form through the rest of the weekend will be a bigger boost for his own confidence after a crash-strewn year as much as it will solidify Honda’s standing in the current pecking order…